


ren does coke and invents chicken fries

by ruruka



Category: The Ren & Stimpy Show
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:01:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26719483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Relationships: Stimpson "Stimpy" J. Cat/Ren Höek
Kudos: 5





	ren does coke and invents chicken fries

It’s 1993 and Ren’s just snorted his third line. 

That should do it for tonight. The bag’s almost empty without any gifted delight in the thought of seeking out another forty dollar half-gram of shit cut coke from a Pitbull in the apartment downstairs. The fur of his spine ripples in an unsightly breath out.

“Oh! Ren,” murmurs around the corner as if vapor slinking into the stinging flesh of his nose. Or maybe it makes more sense that it’d gone into his ears. They twitch now at the thought. Things are starting to get confused up here. Good. That’s what he paid forty bucks for. “Oh! Ren, I found this on the bed. Did you forget it? You silly thing, you.”

From the crest of his head, yellowed crackling fingernails cease their thoughtful scratching to reach a hand out, and without moving from his seat on the couch, grab the leather wallet offered toward him. Only a touch too forceful. The atmosphere in the living room is humid and dim from the lamp poised in the corner, just one of its three bulbs smearing dull light on the beige of the wallpaper. A box fan rattles usually on the windowsill, turned off now to keep his affairs from blowing across the coffee table, leaving all quiet but the cicadas outside and that one single bulb humming louder by the minute. Ren glances briefly somewhere else, shakes his head just to find his license on the table among plastic bags and half dead lighters. Dried lips suck the residue from one edge before sticking it back into his wallet, poke by poke of one index finger until it fits taut back into its card slot, and the leather folds back up to be tossed onto the table with the rest of his shit.

“I didn’t forget it,” Ren says back. A cigarette is in his mouth now, lighter sparking up over and over underneath it until he’s able to get it lit. Something tells him he’s been hunched over elbows to knees like this for hours, and leaning back into the springs of the hot wool couch behind him is a luxury he sighs a lush cloud of smoke to. “Say, Stimpy, how about something to eat? It’s,” and he pauses just to scratch his head again, “it’s six o’clock by now, isn’t it? What’s taking you so long on dinner?”

Loyal as he’s ever so stupidly been, Stimpy hasn’t yet left his spot since sliding into the room to deliver Ren his wallet. Teeth gleaming, he tells him, “It’s ten:thirty, Ren,” and is too preoccupied in gripping his own hands in anguish to notice the clap of shock over the other’s face. “But- But we don’t have anything to eat! I checked the refrigerator, the freezer, the cupboards, the cabinets, the shower drain, under the bed, behind the clock, inside my ears.” A gloved finger pushes into a pointed kitty ear, coming out as pristinely clean as his obsessive hygiene rituals and current lack of food stored inside allow. Abruptly, still with piercing pink eyes on him, Stimpy falls to his knees, palms cupping either eye that gush so suddenly with tears. “And the worst part is...we don’t have anymore kitty litter, either! _AAHG-hoHOOO!”_

“You need a mood stabilizer,” Ren says, licking at the finest bits of cocaine left under his thumbnails. A gruff exhale rocks through him. He taps the menthol cigarette on a plastic cup of water on the coffee table, leans back again and brings the smoke to his mouth, eyes hollow in their gaze forward. “We gotta get some money. If that landlord calls me one more time about the rent being late,” smoke wisps out, ash to cup rim, voice tight with inhalation, “I’m gonna blow his father.”

“Perhaps the factory should pay you more,” Stimpy suggests, sat on the floor with a cockeyed smile, tongue flailing to one side. His lifted finger of epiphany vanishes when Ren smashes a closed fist on it. 

“Perhaps _you_ should learn how the world works! The poor work hard and get poorer, that’s what America is all about!” Stubbed down to the orange, the cigarette butt is tossed to float on the dirty water’s surface. Ren relaxes again. Eyes half lidded. Arms folded behind the head. “Turn the fan on, would you?”

“Sure thing, my honeysuckle.” A giddiness bites Stimpy’s lip and squints his eyes as he springs up toward the window. 

“And pop in a record,” Ren barks once air hits at his stale sticky face. “Something smooth. I wanna relax tonight.”

“Wham! it is!” he hears beyond his closed eyes, soon paired with the scratch of vinyls replacing one another and _The Edge of Heaven_ playing its opening harmonies. 

Life is almost serene until the TV clicks on at a catastrophic volume. The sound of the cat box dragging across the rug pries open one of Ren’s eyes just to watch Stimpy plunk down into the empty plastic of it. 

“Joy!” calls Ren to look again, the sight this time that of Stimpy’s unbelievable grin turned toward him. In his fingertips is clenched a single grain of litter dug from the corner of the box.

Ren squints.

“All yours, pal,” he deigns, his gradually swelling eyelids closing yet again just as Stimpy crunches his front teeth onto the grain of used cat litter.

Some shit cartoon and a Wham! record lull him for the next hour. He can link through sound alone the Muddy Mudskipper intro to the scuffling of Stimpy rolling across the living room floor, and when it ends, the occasional splintering of laughter. Or maybe it’s not that he’s so astute at the asthma-hound ears, and maybe he’s the one mesmerized by the flashing colors on the box TV, maybe he’s the one hopping and flailing around enough at eleven at night to make their downstairs neighbor put even more baby powder in his gram. Ren blinks. Wide at the eyes, droopy at the lips. He looks down, and the skin of his legs drips with wet, glints deep mahogany in the dim light as if he’s being wrung of every last cell, fiber, muscle, ooze of blood. Ren blinks. He looks down and his legs are perfectly normal. Get it together, Mr. Höek, come on. 

“Waaah…” Stimpy sings at a fast food commercial. “Burger King has _Log_ toys in their kids meals now…”

Ren’s neck snaps up red hot. His eyes practically sizzle as they settle on the screen, the advertisement’s enticing, juicy closeups doing their job in making his stomach ache with need. He picks at the skin of his thumb with a forefinger nail. At his bottom lip gnaws top teeth. If he could remember what the word hungry meant, it’d probably feel like this. 

“I can’t take it anymore!” jolts him to his feet. Stimpy turns over a shoulder to glance widely at the new outburst, tilts his head and asks, “Ahh, take what, Ren?” only to be answered in a harshly slapped back, “FOOD- A man needs to eat, doesn't he?! Yeah, yeah...a man can go real _crazy_ without eating anything. Stimpy. Get the car.”

Stimpy lays his expression in a concerned wonder. “But what about the gas-o-leen? Remember, we ran out driving to turn in your two dollar scratch-off winners?”

“We’ll walk! Fuck it!” Ren grins madly, arms tossed up on either side. The fan laps air at his drenched forehead, and he licks his blue tongue tip out at a bead of sweat that trails down to the corner of his mouth. “Let’s go for a run, c’mon, there’s nothin’ else to do! I gotta get my hands on those- those delicious... _coveted, warm, juicy..._ chicken fries…”

Face still cocked in decision, Stimpy clasps a hand to each cheek to now beam broadly, jumping up to run in place and nod his vim every which way. “Yes, sir! Let us go! Bah, by the way, Ren, what are chicken fries?”

Ren blinks one eye at a time. At chipped angles, his teeth all splay in a manic smile, and could he feel his heart, he bets a _three_ dollar scratch-off winner that it’s throbbing like mad right now.

“We’re about to be millionaires, Stimpy,” he boasts. Nary a second wasted, he jets for the door, carpet bunching up beneath Stimpy’s charging feet before he follows behind in a zoom. After them shuts the latch in one great _click_. 

The box fan rattles. The lightbulb hums. The fake leather of Ren’s wallet sits quietly on the coffee table. 


End file.
